Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Plot: So now that we know where everybody is, it’s time to
start giving them stuff to do. And boy do they get stuff. Michonne and Carl
spend the episode wandering around town looking for food, but all they find is
cheese in a can and backstory. We learn a little about Michonne’s life before Z-day,
but sadly no mention of her ninja training with a goateed Liam Neeson.

Also this week, Rick proves once
again why he should never ever be allowed to go to sleep. This time, not only
does he wake up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but he wakes up in the
middle of a zombie apocalypse with a heavily armed gang of crazies taking over
the first floor of the house he was napping in. A heavily armed gang of crazies
that are more than willing to choke each other out for the right to sleep in
what looks like the world’s least comfortable bed. After hiding under said bed
like Kevin McAllister for a bit, Rick sneaks out, kills what we can only hope
and assume was a gang member on that toilet and then saves Carl and Michonne from
wandering right smack what seems to be a pretty bad situation.

Meanwhile, Glenn and Tara are
headed to Washington, D.C. with Rectangle head, Danny McBride and Latina Sarah
Conner. Well, they are until Glenn wakes up and decides to go find his wife. A
large scuffle ensues, a herd of walkers descends on the scene and Danny McBride
valiantly, heroically manages to completely destroy the group’s truck with a
machine gun while killing almost no walkers. But before you start calling him “The
Walking Dead”’s mulleted Gilligan, the man does seem to have a purpose.
Rectangle head, who seems to prefer going by the less geometrically accurate
name of Abraham, informs the gang that the reason they were headed to D.C. was
because Danny McBride knows what started the zombie apocalypse and presumably how
to stop it. Sure saving the world is important and all, but first Glenn needs
to find his wife and because Ladies Love Cool Glenn, Tara and Latina Sara
Conner follow suit, dragging their two male companions along for the ride.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

I've been doing a lot of thinking
about death recently. Not in the melodramatic, what does it all mean, where are
we going sense, but more in the practical, what's going to happen to this hunk
of meat I leave behind?

Maybe hunk is an exaggeration. Average-looking
might be a better way to put it.

So what's caused this?

Well, for one thing, I've been
working my way through “Six Feet Under” since Christmas time and it’s safe to
say that daily doses of that show for going on three months is more than enough
to make you want to splash black paint on your windows, curl up into a ball and
wait for the reaper to show up do his thing.

But more importantly, I've been to
two funerals in the last month, well a funeral and a viewing. All of that got
me thinking about how I want to go out when the time comes.

Or more accurately, what I want
folks to do with me once my spirit has left the building.

And honestly, what better place
than a blog about nothing to record my final and in no way legally binding
wishes?

Perhaps one day when I kick the
bucket, one of my great grandkids, or more likely a special investigator for
the IRS, will find this sandwiched on here in between rants about RoboCop and
briefly consider honoring my wishes. That is before they get to my thoughts onfist-bumps and realize great granddad or the taxpayer clearly hasn’t been in
control of his faculties for some time and thus he should be ignored as much
as possible.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Plot: In
last week’s midseason premiere, “After,” we caught up with the team of Carl and
Rick and Michonne, who was flying solo, as they tried to find their way in a
world after their prison-home was blown up by a tank. This week, we touch base
with everybody else. The episode opens with the most huggable pair of survivors
on the show – Daryl and Beth (formerly known as: “Herschel’s Blonde Daughter”).
They run around in the woods, Beth narrates from her diary, it’s seriously awesome.
Eventually, they wind up tracking what they hope is another group of survivors
through the woods.

When we come back from commercial,
we meet up with Tyreese, who is in a very unenviable state: He’s wounded –
maybe bit – and worse: He’s saddled with the two small blonde girls and Rick’s infant
daughter Judith. Things go from bad to worse for Tyreese when Carol (you know,
the one who he doesn’t know incinerated his sick girlfriend back at the prison)
shows up completely out of nowhere to join their little gang. They kill some
zombies, older blonde girl secretly tries to suffocate baby Judith in order to
keep her from crying and attracting zombies. We realize that this is the
group Daryl and Beth are tracking and the segment ends with Tyreese, Carol and
the kids making their way towards a settlement called Terminus.

Next it’s Maggie, Sasha and Bob,
who is the drunken black dude in case the name Bob doesn’t ring a bell. Bob is
also hurt, but he seems to have been shot, Maggie decides she’s going to leave
them to go follow the bus that Glenn was in, they decide to tag along, they
find the bus and surprise, it’s full of walkers. The gang works together to off
the walkers, Maggie goes inside to look for signs of Glenn. She’s attacked by
and kills one last walker, who keeps his back to the camera, but who has sorta
long, string hair. She breaks down. Did she do it? Did she kill Glenn?

The last segment of the night
answers that: No. You see, Glenn never got on the bus. He ended up stuck on a
catwalk at the prison, finds his way off, goes to take a nap, decides against
it. When he finally gets the memo that it’s time to leave the prison – seeing as
though it’s on fire and deserted, that seems like a plan – he stumbles upon Tara,
one of the Gov’s old pals. She’s pretty bummed about the whole let’s start a
war for that one-eyed guy we just met thing. Glenn, being the peach that he is
and not wanting to go it alone, asks her to come with. As per the usual, they
run into and mow down a bunch of zombies and then, as the episode concludes, a
military vehicle pulls up and out steps Rectangle Head, Danny McBride and Latino
Sarah Conner all decked out in military fatigues.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

My expectations going in to the new “RoboCop” movie were
pretty low to begin with as I walked into a matinee show yesterday.

I didn’t
read any reviews or anything like that, but some of the recent TV spots and the
PG-13 rating didn’t do much to get my hopes up.

So it’s
not exactly accurate to say I was disappointed by what unfolded. In a lot of
ways, I got pretty much what I expected, which adds up to my “meh” feelings
about this one.

It’s 2028
and OmniCorp is a giant, Halliburton-y corporation specializing in robotics,
more specifically in drones built for warfare. The drones have mostly worked in
the Middle East, so it wants to bring the technology home to America.

But the American people don’t like
the idea of putting life or death decisions in the metal hands of machines, at
least not American lives anyway because duh, so Omni’s CEO Raymond Sellars
(Michael Keaton) decides to meet everyone halfway, by sticking a man – or parts
of one – in a robotic suit.

Just so
happens that right around that time, Officer Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is critically
injured by a car bomb in the line of duty. In an effort to give him a second
chance, his wife (Abbie Cornish) signs Murphy’s body over to Omni, thus giving
us RoboCop.

The
biggest problem I had with this remake is one that was nagging me after
watching a few of the movie’s trailers. Even the good ones didn’t seem to have
a big bad, supervillain-type. If you knew the old movies, they you could guess that
Omni would fill that role in some way, but the trailers weren’t pushing anything.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Plot: Following their unceremonious eviction from their
prison fortress and the breakup of their group, Rick and Carl set up camp in a
seemingly abandoned suburban neighborhood. Rick’s in terrible shape after his
fight with the Governor and soon slips into unconsciousness after helping Carl
secure a house for them to stay in. Carl wanders the neighborhood, works out
some daddy issues, loses a shoe, gains a giant can of pudding and eventually
Rick wakes up. Meanwhile, Michonne makes herself a couple of new arm-less,
jaw-less zombie pets so she can walk around un-harassed by the un-dead. We get
a little backstory from her and even some emotion. As the episode ends, she
stumbles upon the house where Rick and Carl are staying, reuniting with her
friends.

Good: No more Gov. It’s risky to say that anyone’s ever
really gone on a show whose basic premise is about people coming back from the
dead. But for all intents and purposes, the Governor seems to be no more. For
now. Seeing him lying there all dead and such at the beginning of this episode
was sorta sad because it meant no more David Morrissey, who was a delight and
who made the best out of a wildly uneven character. It seemed like the show
never really knew what to do with him. Instead of giving the Gov – who comic
book readers swear by – a bad ass run on the show, they hemmed and hawed
through one up and down season and then tacked another half season to boot. And
then the show used that bonus time to make him just go and re-do everything he
did during the previous season. Fare thee well, Gov. Please don’t come back.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

I’ve seen more naked guys than the gay equivalent of Wilt
Chamberlain. Or the female equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain for that matter.

Maybe that statement needs some
context.

I’ve been an avid gym-goer for
several years now. I go early in the morning, pump a little iron as the kids
say and then go to work and sit on my butt all day, completely undoing whatever
progress I’d made earlier. You know, because it’s important to maintain the
status quo.

Anyway, if there’s one thing you
learn by going to gyms during the hours most frequented by an older crowd, it's
that old people have no shame. They give zero craps.

So pretty quickly you get used to
the idea of seeing an old dude brushing his teeth at a sink while his bait and
tackle rests on the counter.

You get used to it and you also
make a mental note to keep your own tooth brush as far away from any and all
surfaces in a locker room as if the toothbrush was your daughter and the surfaces were Justin Bieber - after he’d had a bunch of old man balls rubbed all over
him.

Now I want to make it clear that
being naked in a locker room doesn't bother me. It’s what it’s there for. I’m
frequently naked in locker rooms and occasionally in other rooms, as
well.

But being a repressed,
Catholic-raised prude at heart, the thing that does get to me is this need to
make a show of it, aka the dude scrubbing the counter with his pork and beans.
Or the other guy who feels the need to walk clear across the room in his
birthday suit to weigh himself.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

On average, I’d say I watch somewhere in the neighborhood of
one full football game a year and it just so happens to be the Super Bowl. The large
game. The grande enchilada.

That’s the only football game I’ll
watch from the opening kickoff through the post-end credits scene where Sam
Jackson shows up with a zany plan.

There’s
really no reason for me to watch the aforementioned large game. I don’t have
the stomach to gamble and I’m clearly not much of a football fan. On top of
that, my office doesn’t even have a water cooler, so there’s nothing to gather
around on Monday and dissect the Xs and Os of the game.

And by Xs
and Os I mean the commercials and the halftime show.

Despite
all of that, I still make it a point to watch and have since my days as a small
boy.

Every
year my parents, sister and I would dine on hoagies and wings, eating them off
football-themed plates and napkins. My dad would spend half the game reminding
my mom of how football worked and the other half waving the white flag in the
face of her never-ending onslaught of questions. Every single year.

It
warms the cockles of my heart just thinking about it.

Another
tradition was the decorations. For whatever reason, as a youth I got it in my
head that I needed to be the official decorating committee of my family’s Super
Bowl festivities.

So
starting on Super Bowl eve, I’d cobble together a bunch of hand-made pennants
with crudely scribbled slogans on them: Go Niners! Go Giants! Switzer’s a bum!
And so forth like that.

Then I’d
wait for the first floor of our family home to clear out. I liked to work in
private, so I’d dawdle until everyone wandered to other areas. Perhaps I thought
it was best for artwork of that caliber to hit the audience all at one time.
That way they could drink in the deep-seated commentary I was trying to convey in
one giant gulp.